What’s new we can see in the improved Managed Metadata Service? SharePoint 2013.

Hello,
Today I want to talk about Managed Metadata service in SharePoint 2013. But first I want to clarify a couple of terms for you. As you probably know, metadata is information about information. And metadata management is the way to organize and maintain a company’s information for documents, records, etc. So, Managed Metadata is helping users easily structure and tag content, and provide end-users with the ability to search required information faster.

Managed Metadata service 2013

Since Managed Metadata has been introduced in SharePoint 2010, it has helped users to easily tag and structure content. Like most of its features, SharePoint 2013 has improved the basic Managed Metadata features.Managing metadata effectively requires careful thought and planning. Think about the kinds of information that you want to manage; the content of lists and libraries, and think about the way that the information is used in the organization. You can create sets of metadata terms for different kinds of information.

Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2013

Did you know that in SharePoint 2013 you can use the Managed Metadata service to improve your site navigation structure? You do not need to have any additional programming skills to produce auto-generated pages based on the taxonomy hierarchy. Instead of driving default URLs in a SharePoint 2013 site (like Library/forms/NewForm.aspx) you can easily read URLs from the Managed Metadata Term Store. As a result you will get an intuitive site with user-friendly and search engine-friendly URLs.

Managed Metadata key features

Some Managed Metadata features are very common; filtering list, views based hierarchy, search and SEO optimization. SharePoint 2013 features can deliver additional features like the following.

Better list view filtering. You can do improved filtering, displaying all the tagging with a value or a child of this value.

Better navigation. The Managed Metadata navigation feature allows you to navigate through libraries using hierarchies other than the folder hierarchy.

Better routing. Document routing can direct your content based on the metadata applied to it.

Better file searching. If you can’t remember exactly where your document is stored in a large library, you can use the taxonomy field to filter the open dialog display.

Better sociality. All social properties are sourced from the taxonomy system, so you do not need do additional social tagging.

What’s new in SharePoint Managed Metadata 2013?

There is a couple of main features which have been improved in SharePoint 2013 Managed Metadata service.

Pinned Terms. Terms can be reused in the Term Store, so you do not need create duplicates of terms.

Datasheet View. In SharePoint 2013, Managed Metadata columns support the Datasheet View, so you can use three additional options: replace all selected values with required terms, add terms to all selected fields, and remove terms from all selected fields.

There are the two most used features in the new SharePoint 2013 Managed Metadata service, but not all of them. You can check it all for yourself after purchasing a hosted SharePoint 2013 service from PlexHosted.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!

What is SharePoint? Five Common Ways to use SharePoint sites

Hello,
Today I would like to talk about common ways to use SharePoint.

What is SharePoint? SharePoint history

SharePoint was launched by Microsoft in 2001 and it was called “SharePoint Portal Server 2001”. The first release of SharePoint was supposed to be a platform for document and content management. Over a decade has passed since that time and SharePoint has undergone multiple changes. The latest release of SharePoint has far more functionality. Nowadays it is usually called a business collaboration platform or application platform. Since SharePoint combines in itself various technologies, solutions and numerous features, it is extremely difficult to give an exact definition to what SharePoint is and what it is used for. In the internet you can find dozens of definitions and explanations.

Depending on the type of business, a SharePoint platform can serve different purposes. It is a centralized system that can be accessed through multiple devices connected to the internet, therefore the most significant function of SharePoint is to join all your employees from different departments, offices, buildings, cities or even countries, and provide them with a single place to complete their daily jobs and communicate with each other.
SharePoint brings benefits not only to large companies with multiple users, but also to small businesses of any type.

Common ways to use SharePoint sites

We can distinguish the following most common ways to use SharePoint:

Document and content management system – from the very beginning until the present day, SharePoint platforms are continuously used by many companies as a file share system with advanced settings. A centralized place where documents and files can be securely stored and easily accessed by end users, a role based security system and other powerful content management features draws the most attention from customers.

Company intranet SharePoint – most successful company intranet portals are built on a SharePoint platform. SharePoint provides tools for social networking, creating blog sites and company wikis. It provides an environment convenient for receiving the latest company news, announcements, scheduling and managing personal tasks, contacts and verifying the statuses of the latest projects.

Public facing website – SharePoint can also be used as a platform for a company’s website. It allows the creation of multiple publicly available pages with company information, text, images and graphics. SharePoint supports advanced HTML editing and all modern web technologies. This results in the ability to run a 100% custom branded site. SharePoint publishing features enable administrators to control the content, design and update pages, as well as manage permissions for the site.

Team collaboration – SharePoint is a perfect tool for your teams to coordinate on projects, connect to sites from different devices and receive notifications about updates. SharePoint allows team members to stay connected to the process, check project statuses, schedules, communicate with each other and access all information related to the project.

Business Analytics – SharePoint Business Intelligence features provide the ability to get critical information from the insights and, subsequently, to enhance productivity, improve decision-making and increase profits for the company. SharePoint allows the creation rich dashboards, graphs and charts, display trends, setup key performance indicators and a lot more to analyze company data.

And last but not the least, SharePoint can be customized for a company`s specific use. It can be adapted to perform functions that meet the needs of your business and are critical for your company’s success.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!

An Intranet is an internal company portal that can be used to make team work more productive, effortless, cost effective and competitive. It is an essential part of the organization’s infrastructure. A successful SharePoint intranet usually has high usability because company owners have full control over the environment and know exactly who the users are and how they actually use intranet. Investments in intranet improvements are crucial since the intranet usability and high user adoption helps improve business productivity and therefore increase overall company profits.

SharePoint Intranet

SharePoint is one of the most widely used application platforms for a company’s intranet portal. According to the Nielsen Norman Group`s research, 70% of successful intranets are built on SharePoint. Additionally, Nielsen Norman Group determines 10 best intranet portals every year and the best ones for 2013 are:

These companies are of different sizes and from different countries. These intranets are used for their entire organizations and have been designed to take into consideration specific company needs in their particular sphere of business.
To read about these companies please see the following page – 2013 Intranet Design Award Winners.

This research helps to specify the latest trends in the development of successful intranet portals. Let’s take a look at them.

Time for intranet design – the average time to create and design a portal is 3.5 years, but lately it has decreased to 2.3 years. The process of designing a company portal is not a simple task.

The size of an organization – it has become simpler for small companies to develop good company portals using modern technologies. The SharePoint platform provides a number of features for great intranet implementation with its social features, efficient MS Office integration, information search and filtering capabilities.

Intranet management team – nowadays it is important to involve more people in building a successful intranet site. It is impossible for a small team to design and manage an intranet portal that will completely satisfy the needs of all company employees and help improve collaboration and work productivity. The more people involved in the building process – the better the result will be for end users.

Consulting companies and developers – external consultants are usually involved in helping with SharePoint planning, development, design and branding. They serve to complete particular tasks in which your company`s team does not have enough expertise.

The authors of intranet content – it is important to consider the primary requirements of the employees when designing the intranet. The best way to ensure usability, high user adoption rates and relevant content inside the portal is to involve people from different offices and departments, the people who will use the site.

Feature and design development – the latest trend in intranets is to use such features as personalized pages, extended profiles, video channels and mega menus. The additional new features widely used are integration with social sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, and extended filters on site pages.

Educating employees about social and enterprise features of the platform – intranet users need to know the main usage rules and it is a good idea to provide a short guideline for them. It is also important to establish communication between teams and motivate users for commenting, sharing and creating conversations.

Permissions – complex site permissions can be a nightmare for your intranet management team. Nowadays most of the companies tend to protect business critical files by using simple permission strategies to avoid the unnecessary complexity.

The practice of a great number of companies from all over the world shows that the SharePoint platform is a perfect tool for designing a company’s intranet portal. Taking into consideration the latest trends, advances from SharePoint consultants and experienced users, you can build a powerful portal for your team and achieve better results.PlexHosted can provide you with a starting point for your successful intranet. From the planning stage, to SharePoint implementation and customization – this is something PlexHosted can help you with.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!

Hello,
As you probably know, with SharePoint you have two options for installation: SharePoint 2013 Foundation and SharePoint 2013 Server. In this post I want to tell about the SharePoint 2013 Foundation edition.

SharePoint 2013 Foundation Edition

SharePoint 2013 Foundation provides you with the basic SharePoint collaboration features which are fundamental and required to build collaboration and communication sites for your company. With SharePoint 2013 Foundation you can move all documents from a stored version to the Internet and improve document management. It’s interesting, isn’t it? If so, you can learn about the major features of SharePoint Foundation platform at this post.

SharePoint 2013 Foundation Features

SharePoint Foundation Collaboration. SharePoint Foundation sites offer access to information located in one place. Your company’s employees can share information regardless of their location by using a user-friendly interface. SharePoint Foundation libraries are the best place for documents rather than standard file sharing solutions.

SharePoint Foundation Security. With role-based security settings you can be sure that important information is secure and available only for people with permission to use it.

SharePoint Foundation Development. You can use a lot of SharePoint Foundation default templates to get the functionality you need. There are templates for creating wikis, blogs and other social sites available with SharePoint Foundation.

SharePoint Foundation Using. Since SharePoint Foundation provides integration with Microsoft Office. Employees can use MS Word and other Office products to create and manage documents. As such they will work in a familiar environment and make it easy to adopt the SharePoint environment.

In short, SharePoint Foundation represents the basic content storage and collaboration features of SharePoint. With PlexHosted SharePoint 2013 Foundation edition you can get a SharePoint Foundation site in a few minutes, save time on implementation, and save money since the price are greatly reduced.
SharePoint 2013 Foundation is ideal for small companies looking to improve their employees’ ability to work with each other in a secure, easy-to-use platform for collaboration.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!

Hello
Are you looking for a trustworthy and cost effective SharePoint Hosting 2013 Provider? Do you want a SharePoint site that does not lose your business data? Please read the following SharePoint hosting provider overview and so you can choose the best SharePoint hosting provider.

Considerations when choosing a SharePoint Hosting Provider

How to choose a qualified SharePoint Hosting provider?

Company owners and other decision makers can choose among several alternative SharePoint services that will be best for their company and provide the best return on investment. Here’s what to consider when choosing SharePoint for your business:

SharePoint Edition – First of all, you need to select the SharePoint version (2010 or 2013) you need and what feature edition, Foundation, Standard or Enterprise, has the most relevant features for you. Take a look at PlexHosted’s feature comparison page and see what features are best for your company and employees. This will help to determine what SharePoint edition works best for you.

SharePoint Storage and Users – How much storage is required for your site and how many users will be using it? Determine how many employees will need access to your site, and for what purposes it will used. This will help you to decide whether you need 500 Mb for simple document repository, or several GB for pictures, videos, forms, records, databases, and workbooks. Note that for a large storage requirement (from 100 GB) it may be more convenient and cost effective to setup a dedicated server. In addition PlexHosted has no user limits, so you can have 1, 2 or any other number of SharePoint users with the ability to increase/decrease the number of users and/or amount of storage at any time.

SharePoint Internet or Intranet site – Will you need to open your site to the public by enabling Anonymous access? The license for this feature is costly for Standard and Enterprise editions, so you should pay attention to this requirement. When choosing the proper SharePoint edition, SharePoint feature set and anonymous access are important to think about.

So now you know three main options that will assist you in choosing the best SharePoint hosting provider. Not all SharePoint hosting providers offer all SharePoint hosting plans with all the necessary features. It might be good for them, but will probably not work for you. PlexHosted offers four different SharePoint hosting plans: Foundation, Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise with PowerPivot which should meet your requirements. PlexHosted also offers multi-tenant hosting as well as dedicated servers for SharePoint hosting.

How to make sure you have chosen the best SharePoint hosting company with SharePoint experts?

The following guidelines will help you make sure you are working with SharePoint experts.

SharePoint support should be available 24/7/365 to help you resolve any issues or clarify configuration options.

99.99% availability for SharePoint servers.

No hidden fees for SharePoint hosting services and support, and no hidden SharePoint limits.

After answering these questions and putting together the necessary information, you will know what is needed for your business and find a perfect solution for you. But, if you still have questions, you are always free to ask PlexHosted’s SharePoint experts for their help. Since PlexHosted meets all these requirements you can be assured that you will be working with SharePoint experts.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!

Hello readers,
Need to learn about SharePoint licensing for a new project? Want to know how to pay the minimum price for the best SharePoint hosting? You are at the right place. In today’s post I`ll tell you about SharePoint hosting plans and SharePoint 2013 licensing.

SharePoint 2013 hosting plans

There are different SharePoint hosting environments, dedicated and multi-tenant and three SharePoint editions. All this can confuse end users which have not worked with SharePoint before. At first look, SharePoint licensing seems difficult to understand. But if we take a look at it more deeply you will learn that SharePoint licensing is pretty easy to understand.

SharePoint 2013 CALs Licensing

PlexHosted offers SharePoint in three editions: Foundation, Standard, and Enterprise. The main difference between editions is in the various SharePoint features (see SharePoint Features Comparison) and pricing for the Client Access Licenses (CALs). SharePoint Enterprise edition offers an additional capability for Business Intelligence (PowerPivot Workbooks Hosting). In general, all SharePoint sites are licensed using a CAL model – CALs are required for each user accessing a SharePoint site. Let’s take a look at SharePoint 2013 hosting plans offered by PlexHosted.

SharePoint 2013 Foundation CALs – you can have an unlimited number of users without paying for CALs, so you pay only for the SharePoint site storage. More details are at PlexHosted SharePoint 2013 Foundation

The other point to keep in mind is the pricing for SharePoint CALs is the same for multi-tenant and dedicated environments.

SharePoint Hosting Environment Licensing

Multi-tenant SharePoint Hosting Environment – With multi-tenant SharePoint hosting you get access to the SharePoint site collection level without having to pay separately for SharePoint/SQL licenses and servers. It`s really great to have a SharePoint site and pay only for the site size and CALs

Dedicated SharePoint Hosting Environment – With dedicated SharePoint hosting you get root access to all servers in your SharePoint farm as well as complete access to SharePoint Central Administration. In this case the price for dedicated hosting includes all the necessary licenses and pricing for CALs (for the specified number of users), servers, and SharePoint/SQL licenses. Alternatively you can supply your own Microsoft licenses under Microsoft’s License Mobility plan

As I promised SharePoint 2013 licensing is pretty easy to understanding. So, now you know the difference between all SharePoint editions and environments. Hope my post is helpful and can help you to make a right choice in SharePoint 2013 hosting.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!

Dear reader,
In this post we will talk about the SharePoint hosting. You should be happy to know that PlexHosted offers the best price for hosted SharePoint 2013. As always, you can learn about PlexHosted new prices New SharePoint Hosting 2013 plans or, firstly, learn about main changes in SharePoint hosting plans and after that review them.

Hosted SharePoint site

A hosted SharePoint site delivers to end users the powerful features of SharePoint. If you choose a multi-tenant environment of PlexHosted SharePoint hosting, you can avoid the associated overhead of managing the SharePoint infrastructure yourself. This solution eliminates the need for IT staff to monitor and manage SharePoint servers. Flexible management options of SharePoint hosting ensure that you can get the SharePoint site control you need to meet all requirements of your business.

New SharePoint Hosting plans from PlexHosted

So, you want to know about main changes in SharePoint Hosting plans from PlexHosted. The one main change from old SharePoint hosting plans to new SharePoint hosting plans is that the price for SharePoint 2013 hosting has been lowered! This change has been applied for multi-tenant SharePoint hosting as well as dedicated SharePoint hosting.

SharePoint Hosting environments: Multi-Tenant and Dedicated

Multi-tenant SharePoint Hosting Environment

With multi-tenant hosting solutions you can get access to the SharePoint site collection level without having to pay for a dedicated SharePoint hosting environment. The new price for SharePoint Multi-Tenant hosting starts from $7.95/Month for 0.5GB of site storage. For more details please click: New SharePoint Foundation hosting plans

Dedicated SharePoint Hosting Environment

With dedicated SharePoint hosting you get root access to all servers in your SharePoint farm as well as complete access to SharePoint Central Administration. In addition full white label customer branding is also available. For those customers who need to add additional custom software to meet business requirements that exceed the out-of-the-box SharePoint solution, a dedicated hosting environment will work best for you. The new price for dedicated SharePoint hosting starts from $380/Month, more details you can read here: New Dedicated SharePoint 2013 plans

Hi dear readers,
Today, I want to talk about the SharePoint 2013 branding. When you access SharePoint 2013 site for the first time you will see the out-of-the-box SharePoint design without any other references to your company. Probably you can get the custom site URL and a title at the SharePoint site, but most hosting providers offer this as paid option (please note that with PlexHosted you can get it for free!), but you need to know that this look and feel has been designed by Microsoft for the common uses. Now you can decide for yourself how you want to use this site and whether you want SharePoint 2013 site leave “as is” or to build your own environment to enrich your company’s identity.

SharePoint 2013 Branding

SharePoint Branding is the essential part of every business strategy that helps your company to show its personality, values, projects, attitude to business and brand promise. If you are going to use SharePoint 2013 as your company’s intranet or internet public facing site, company`s SharePoint 2013 branding is always important and should not be overlook.

So, why it is so important to brand SharePoint 2013 site for your business?

SharePoint 2013 Branding Benefits

Please see main bullets to take into consideration while making your choice below:

SharePoint 2013 Branding. Decreasing time required for the user`s adaptation – one of the most important parts of your company’s SharePoint site is how it could be used by your employees. The customized SharePoint 2013 site allow you to get an intuitive interface and do exactly what you need at the SharePoint site. So when we say “SharePoint 2013 branding” – we mean the SharePoint user-friendly interface which is approachable for understanding. Visually impactful, interesting, easier to use, trendy and modern looking site will definitely increase overall traffic, help your employees relate to the website and use it on a daily basis. SharePoint 2013 collaboration platform is often used as a tool for company`s communication.

SharePoint 2013 Branding. Developing company`s working culture – a customized SharePoint site shows company`s attitude to employees, shows your business strong identity with a world-class services and products, helps to establish trust and faith outside your organization, better understand the corporate goals and inspire them to do their best and make your business more and more successful. Well-designed SharePoint 2013 portal used for company`s team communication and collaboration makes people dedicated to the working process, better and easier accomplish their daily jobs and use this platform to its maximum.

SharePoint 2013 Branding. Improving the information architecture – the information architecture of your SharePoint 2013 site helps to create that page layout that meets company`s needs, makes the SharePoint site easier to use and search, helps to arrange business information logically and provides a positive experience of the company to company`s employees and partners. Making users happy will always increase their productivity and the overall income in the result.

SharePoint 2013 Branding. Avoiding mess at the SharePoint site – well organized and branded SharePoint 2013 site will help you mess all data, without clear ownership, styles, fonts, themes, consistency, images and company identity. Well-panned, organized and governed SharePoint site will show your attitude to your employees and their work.

SharePoint 2013 Branding. Instilling confidence – when the SharePoint 2013 site is well managed and planned, users always know that you take care of them the same as you take care about customers, partners and show that your company is serious enough to create the best working place for employees with the accurate and updated data.

SharePoint 2013 Branding. Senses of belonging and pride – this is last but, definitely, not least. Creating a rich SharePoint brand and strong company identity and building a special place comfortable for employees will give them a sense of belonging to the great successful organization, sense of partnership and make them proud of the place they work. And this in its turn makes people more involved, attached and excited to what they do and inspires them to leverage all their potential in order to achieve company’s goals.

And what is the great for all this, PlexHosted can provide you with starting point for your site – SharePoint 2013 platform in hosted or dedicated environment and help you to brand the SharePoint 2013 site in the way you want. In addition to the excellent customer support, available 24/7/365, PlexHosted offer customization and branding services and gives the ability to create your unique and rich company identity.

Dear readers,
I would love to tell you about the PlexHosted demo business portal in this post. So you can grab a cup of coffee or tea and enjoy this post.

SharePoint Portals with PowerPivot

After release of the Microsoft SharePoint 2013 PlexHosted was pleased to announce the availability of the SharePoint 2013 Enterprise with PowerPivot service. And now this service proved it popularity and necessity among multiple companies. Many customers have already appreciated high quality of SharePoint with PowerPivot solution and its great impact on their business process. This service provide users with the full spectrum of Business Intelligence features and helps to get critical information from the insights, increase productivity and collaboration, improve decision-making and gain profits to the company.

PlexHosted service provider as an unquestioned expertise in SharePoint is always ready to prove the quality, exceptional performance, reliability, protection, and scalability of the services. We provide users the access to the PlexHosted Business Intelligence Demo Portal to evaluate the service by themselves, see how it looks like and works. On these portals you can find demo Excel and PowerPivot workbooks, with rich dashboards, scorecards, timelines, slicers, filters, DAX and PowerView reports.

Custom Demo SharePoint Portal

SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence Demo Portal

Now take a look on now is how PlexHosted BI Demo portal looks like. You can see the customized start page, custom theme and master page. Doesn’t it look great? Moving further you can see pages with workbooks, Business Reports gallery, Demo Reporting BI Portal custom page without standard SharePoint snippets, buttons, and ribbon. This gives a great user experience and cleaner interface for read only users.

Demo SharePoint 2013 Business Portal

Restricted Downloading in SharePoint PowerPivot

What is the most important and magnificent in this customization is that users cannot download the workbooks and reports from this site. This is provides read only access to the data, higher level of protection and convenient demonstration of the data. Very useful customization for sharing workbooks and reports.

The main idea here is that if you want to customize your SharePoint site and create new fresh look for it – this is not the problem. PlexHosted team can easily do it for you. Change master pages, apply the same design as at our Demo site, restrict to download content for read only users – all this and more is the option for you. PlexHosted can help you to make your SharePoint to look like and behave in the exact way you want.

All this and more is what PlexHosted provide to all our customers. Great service and flexibility in customizations, solution that meets you needs and excellent customer support available 24/7/365 you achieve when subscribing to our services.

Hi readers,
I would like to inform you about a SharePoint Customization and Branding availability at the PlexHosted company. Hope you will be impressed and try a portal with custom design not putting off.

SharePoint Portals

SharePoint Portal is a one of the most famous and most popular products of Microsoft and a highly utilized web platform for business collaboration, communication and socialization. Great number of companies have already chosen this platform, evaluated all the variety of SharePoint capabilities and compliance features and appreciated incredible positive impact on their business lifecycle. Those, who have just signed up for SharePoint services or purchased a dedicated SharePoint server, have the almost unlimited opportunities and number of ways to make their intranet and internet business communication much more efficient and increase the output. And what I would like to emphasize on – is on the last one. You can alter, modify and customize your SharePoint site to make it that exact thing you need and to use it in your own purposes critical for your business success. If you are not familiar with SharePoint developing, I have great news for you.

SharePoint Customization from PlexHosted Announce

PlexHosted provides Hosted SharePoint 2010 and 2013 in shared and dedicated environment. And what is the most important PlexHosted as your hosting provider can not only to configure and monitor your environment, help you with the services, but also can help you to customize SharePoint site according to your needs. PlexHosted staff is well-known and of unquestioned expertise in the SharePoint Hosting industry and without doubts can help you to make your site to perform the exact what you want from it. Changing master pages and page layouts is easy with number of predefined themes, build-in editing capabilities and tools like SharePoint Designer has become much more easier, but if you unsure how to use them or new to SharePoint PlexHosted team is always here to help you. If you want to brand your site, create your own styles, public and personal views, remove links of add them, add some script etc. this is what you can do on SharePoint, or get assistance on how to do it, or get it done for you. Your sites look and feel depends from what you need or want to do – leave it as is, or completely remove any reminder that is actually SharePoint.

PlexHosted developers will create custom lists, new forms and customize existing ones. Publish forms using InfoPath, create custom pages, add list for specific purposes – all this is not the full list of existing capabilities. To get more details please visit PlexHosted SharePoint Customization page. You can ask PlexHosed staff about PlexHosted SharePoint services and always get professionally assistance.